. . . but anything that reduces the amount of plastic I have to hack through is a worthy change in its own right.

Now, if only they would find something harmful about those stupid plastic ties used in the packaging of kids' toys, life would be perfect.

I too cheer for the cardboard packaging, but only because I fear for my life everytime I open one of those "clamshell" ones. Its a lose-lose situation-- either break out a swiss army knife and risk slipping and cutting your hand off, or try cutting a little bit then ripping it the rest of the way, only to slip and cut your hand off on the sharp plastic shell.

I'm lucky enough to have a husband who works at a Trader Joes, so he just brings home whatever we need at the end of his shift. We have to do the weekly Target or "regular" grocery store trips though. I won't buy or use some TJ's things, like their hippy-tree-hugger TP.

Stories like this are the reason that I live my life with the singular purpose of destroying the universe.

The solution to all the woes of shopping-related pollution is simple: stop buying crap. The way to implement this solution (which seems so straightforward, and yet runs so against our acquisitive natures and consumerist conditioning) is also simple: decide to move 1500 miles across country. This will force one to go through the mountains of crap one has already bought over the years, with regular breaks to clutch one's brow and shriek "Sweet tapdancing Jesus, what was I thinking? Why, God, why?" And after one has spent days and weeks Craigslisting, Freecycling, and just plain throwing out consumer goods whose moment of tinselly allure faded long ago, and contemplating all the things of more enduring worth one might have done with the money thus squandered, one will develop a whole new attitude toward the entire recreational-shopping experience.

Having said which -- oh hell yes, I'll be buying useless crap in the future, no doubt, and I am very glad to know that the hateful titanium-plastic clamshell packaging may be on its way out. I have had it with risking death by arterial severage simply in order to extricate a cheap cordless mouse or four-pack of batteries.

Would it count as ecofriendly to eliminate at least two of the three pieces of tape sealing shut almost every DVD?

I like these corn-starch packaging peanuts; you can pour them down the sink, and they don't build up static electricity.

oh, I have tools. saber, reciprocating, circular, table, hand saws... three kinds of aviation snips... router... drills, a shelf full of drills... chest of X-acto knives... scissors until the day won't end. brick and steel chisels. sledges. magic swiss army knife with a little LED flashlight. old floppies of PC Tools and Nortons. wizard tools for aligning U-matic videotape recorders.

you can't open those evil alien pods without getting cut, breaking a tool, or destroying the product inside. the plastic has a grain, you cut with it, you can make headway, but cut AGAINST the grain, and fingers fall to the floor. one of the Ronco-wannabees used to sell a clamshell opener, more useless plastic junk with a fragment of razor blade at an angle. they, of course, break on use.

it's enough to send you to the bottle of Triopenin (tm), of the child-proof cap made famous the first year of Saturday Night Live.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75atriopenin.phtml

however, the stuff now comes in clamshell packages.

When I was working in a toy store a few years back, one of the reasons we were given for the elaborate clamshell packaging was to prevent shop lifting. Either the bulky package would hinder concealment or the bullet proof plastic would slow the thief down. I often would come across the empty packages as I cleaned up around the store. Either the package was not doing its job or my fellow employees were not.

Maybe the shop lifters could hire themselves out on Christmas morning to help open presents.

I find this little vignette, tacked on at the bottom of the story, very interesting.

"VINYL CHLORIDE

The EPA has classified vinyl chloride, the key building block of PVC, as a known human carcinogen. Breathing vinyl chloride over long periods of time can result in permanent liver damage, nerve damage and liver cancer. Studies suggest that infants and young children might be more susceptible than adults to vinyl chloride-induced cancer."

This is true of course, as is this statement from the article.

"Worse still, it was made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which contains chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health problems."

The problem is that the toxicity of vinyl chloride (VC) has absolutely nothing to do with the threat posed by polyvinyl chloride. The chemicals in PVC that are linked to cancer and other serious health problems are not VC (which is safely sequestered in polymerized form) but plasticizer additives. I have seen no credible group or agency claim that vinyl chloride is leeching out of PVC.

So why the misleading sidebar?

I have a sister in-law who refuses to go to Wal-Mart unless she absolutely can not find what she needs at some other store. Of course she is also one of those people who drives two miles past Wal-Mart seven days a week to her favorite eco friendly grocery store and is sure by doing this she is helping to save the planet. Go Figure ?

it's kinda nice when this happens... me? i'm no enviro, but if this is what's needed to sound the death-knell for clamshell packaging... then go green.

i think the key to caring about the environment (for me anyway) is finding ways to basically blend it in to the background of daily life rather than the smug, self-righteous in-your-face, "i'm more eco-conscious than you" attitude i encounter.

I'm willing to make small changes like that, what i'm not willing to do is turn in to vegan-mudpie extrodinaire to "reduce my overall carbon footprint by .25%"

I love ya' James, but you are being overly flippant about this rather serious problem. The madness will only end when each household is charged not a flat monthly fee for garbage pickup, but by how *much* they discard. When how much is discarded starts affecting the consumer's pocketbook is when he will start choosing the packaged item that will generate the least amount of waste. Right now there is no incentive to generate 10 lbs of garbage a month as opposed to 100 lbs a month.

...and whoever invented the clamshell must die. I finally realized I have to attack those darn things with stout box cutters -- and do so on a cutting board (after plowing a groove on my kitchen table). Even then there's a high probability of injury in doing the final rip-apart. I've always wondered why companies are so intent on expressing such utter contempt for the people who buy their stuff.

We do pay according to how much trash we generate. I pay $15/month for my trash can. If I used less, I could get by on the smaller $10 can. If I can't fit all of my trash in the can I have, I have to call the hauler and arrange a extra fee for more garbage. Have you never had a garbage hauler before, efurman?

Check this out (no, not my blog):
http://www.stopbuyingcrap.com/

Good reading in the same vein.

I assume these dangerous, frustrating packages will not disappear overnight so, I'll pass on what I have found to be the safest way to open clamshells: Cutco Super Shears®

Link: Cutco.com shears

We have had these at home for over 10 years without ever having them sharpened. They are designed for kitchen work but, have many applications. I went the box cutter route many times on clamshells and had the same near death experience of others until I remembered my wife buying these from from a Tupperware type party. You just trim around the edge of the package where it is welded and it falls apart very nicely.

I suppose they might be helpful with real clam shells as well.

I don't sell Cutco and currently know no one who does but, the web site makes it easy to find a local salesperson or I bet they will have a booth at the fair.

I also have a story for another time when these came in handy to rescue a very upset ferret.

Well;

Plastic is evil, I guess. I've been in the packaging industry a long time so perhaps you might permit one or two questions?

On a per ton basis, which requires more energy to manufacture, PVC or cardboard? And how many ipod packages can you make from 1 ton of each material? And how much pollution is created from the manufacture of one ton's worth of paper pulp compared to, say, a ton of PVC resin made in a reactor? What kind of pollution is it?

And what are the relative transportation costs for each packaging material, first as raw stock (logs vs pvc precursor chemicals), then as finished rolls of packaging ?

And what about scrap rates? Cardboard will simply not be as protective as the clamshell (try spraying a little water on a cardboard box, or sitting on it)... more damaged goods and returns would be a fair bet, unless you use HEAVY cardboard.

Everyone wants to be green. Most times the solutions are neither quick, nor simple. Food for thought.

As stewards of God's earth, we are bound to conserve Mother Earth's precious resources. A recent New Yorker item offered an entirely fresh perspective on the subject. It was a drawing of a woman holding a gun to her husband's head. "Sorry, but I'm reducing our carbon footprint by 50%," the caption read.

Unorthodox, yes, but effective.

Well said againhesays. I think it is interesting that most of the comments on this topic referred to the frustration of opening the packaging or disposal and not with un-green* nature of plastics.

I have always felt that plastic is very important and that is why we should be careful with our oil supply.

*what is the opposite of green? red isn't it? But red is the opposite of blue in politics and war games. We need to quit picking on innocent colors.

Don't decomposing bodies produce greenhouse gas? :)

I welcome the elimination of these stupid impenetrable clamshells, even though they could have been redesigned to add "easy to open" to their existing attributes of protecting and displaying the product. Of course, then that might have foiled the "shoplift-proofing" that they supposedly offer (makes sense).

I am also happy to see that makers of cleaning products like laundry detergent and dish soap are moving toward more concentrated "ultra" formulations ("ultra" meaning "approximately as concentrated as everything used to be before we started watering it all down").

I have always purchased cleaning products that claim to offer the same number of "servings" as their larger-package competitors, but these products have obviously not fared well over the years (anyone rememember the now-dead "Fresh Start" powdered laundry soap?), since Joe Six-Pack walks into Wal-Mart, sees a 55-gallon drum of detergent and assumes, "Wow, this thing must do 300 loads!" not noticing the smaller bottle nearby that actually does the same number of loads. Consumers fall for large packaging--that's why manufacturers keep doing it.

I also welcome the day when cereal and cracker boxes (and even cans) either shrink to represent the true amount they contain or are filled to the top of their packaging. This practice, too, has been a tremendous waste of energy, and I'm surprised no manufacturer has tapped consumer anger by offering a full line of "Full Pack (tm)"-certified foods.

In regard to "conditioning," I suspect that your true environmentalist would say that the real problem with James' scenario of buying a large bale of bathroom tissue is not that we have been conditioned to buy TP every week, but that we have been conditioned to wipe our rear ends at all. As the animals we are, we should be living off the land in hunter-gatherer societies whose subsistence nature makes the development of such wasteful practices as butt-wiping materials irrelevant. (If we should be allowed to live at all, they might say.)

I agree with James about foam peanuts, one of the most annoying products ever. However, I think he's mistaken in assuming they contain "Chinese air." The plastic may be made in China, but I can guarantee you it is shipped in rolls that are puffed up and final-sealed in the good old USA--in fact, it happens at the very warehouse your Amazon order is shipped from, just moments before their balloony little pockets fill your box. In terms of convenience and ease of disposability (I don't mind keeping a few in the basement for shipping my own stuff out), I'd take the air pillows any day over the foam peanuts.

Not sure who your garbage hauler is, but the two that I am familiar with who do business in Minnetonka have a sliding rate scale based on the size of your garbage container. You can get a small container for a low monthly rate, or the monster container for a larger monthly rate. The recycling fee is the same for any volume, so it's in your interest to recycle as much as you can so you can have the smallest garbage container you need.
I think that rate structure is the same in many communities.

Last I heard, it involved large-scale tree destruction to manufacture. Didn't that use to be an eco-sin?

Nobody has mentioned burning garbage. We have the technology now to burn it at high temps and thus eliminate most of the toxins. As a bonus side effect, we get heat and can manufacture electricity. As for consuming and packaging, try not having a car at all and riding your bike whenever you have to get anything. And in the winter, I walk. Makes you think twice before you get anything at all.

efurman,

We here in Austin (Texas, not Minnesota) pay more for throwing out more. Each home has either a 30, 60, or 90 gallon garbage can and pays $11.75, $14.50, or $17.25 per month respectively. That is both in line with Austin's hippy tree-hugger reputation and your suggestion that we should pay more for throwing out more.

Difference? Packaging here is identical to packaging everywhere else.

I'm with James on this one, ditch the clamshell and dump everything else in North Dakota (or words to that effect).

Againhesays has a very good point; sometimes packaging can in fact be eco-friendly. This was covered on NPR's Science Friday a few weeks ago (probably still on iTunes). For example, a TV manufacturer increased the amount and robustness of their packing boxes, enabling them to eliminate an entire step in the warehouse/transportation chain, with a big savings in fuel costs more than offsetting the increased packaging. The only reason a one inch SD memory card is packaged in a 12-inch clamshell is for theft deterrence, but you wouldn't want your ipod or digital camera or 24-piece "designer" glassware set to be packed in recycled kleenex, either.

I am not local, I am reading this story from Florida. I can tell you that while some of your garbage haulers may charge you more for more waste, none of the ones I am familiar with do. I can put 10 trash cans or 1 trash can and I am charged the same rate.

It's just different in each municipality, I suppose!

Not much of an environmentalist here (or at least not the holier-than-thou kind), but I welcome the death of the clamshells.

First: because I've cut myself, and actually damaged the product (printer cartridges) trying to extricate them from the accursed 'shells.

Second: the less packaging the better. Because the less packaging, the less room it takes up, the fewer bags I have to haul the mile-and-a-half to my car across the blazing-hot parking lot, and the less stuff I have to haul from my car into the house.

Oh, and as for "just don't buy crap"? Well, I try...but you know, I just seem to keep using up paper and printer ink and they've yet to manufacture a man-in-the-white-suit type fabric for blue jeans that never wears out.